Private MD News

Students try to raise awareness of HIV risks

Category: HIV

With positive HIV tests becoming more common among the younger generation, public health experts have said that more needs to be done to educate adolescents about the dangers of the disease and how risky sexual behavior increases the risk of transmission.

One group of high school students in San Francisco heard this message and decided to give their classmates a first-hand lesson in sexual responsibility. Nearly all of the 75 seniors at the Urban School of San Francisco received HIV testing in the school gymnasium as part of an effort to raise awareness of the disease, according to the Associated Press.

Students said that awareness of the dangers of HIV is relatively low at their school. However, due to the fact that rates of the disease are rising in younger people, outreach efforts like this are needed.

"A lot of kids have never thought about it," Oliver Hamilton, one of the students who helped organize the testing event, told the news source. "The goal is to make HIV relevant."

More than 1 million people in the U.S. are currently living with HIV, while 20 percent of these people are unaware that they are infected, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.